This chapter details the files involved in the production and use of HH content. The formats this chapter makes reference to are discussed in the next chapter, which discusses all the file formats.
The content files contain the help topics, including HTML, images, stylesheets, scripts, samples and other files. These are known as Compiled HTML Help files or CHMs. They make use of the ITSF filesystem format.
CHI, CHW and CHQ files store merged Indexes, ALinks/KLinks and Search information respectfully for merged CHMs and collections of CHMs. They are located in the same folder as the CHM and have the ITSF format, but are usually not compressed, ensuring speedy access.
CHS files store information about the subsets that the user and or help author has created. They are located in the same folder as the CHM and have their own binary format.
HHP files are HTML Help Project files and store information on options, window types, merge info, a file list, text popups, information types, context-sensitive help, and subsets and are in INI format. Parts of the HHP format can be excised into text files and included from the HHP.
HHC files are HH Table of Contents files, store the Contents and are in Sitemap format.
HHK files are HH Index files, store the Index and are in Sitemap format.
HHS files are HH Samples files, store the samples information and are in INI format.
STP files are HH Stop-list files, store the words to be ignored when generating search data and are in text format.
ALI files are HH alias files, store context-sensitivity links and are in text format.
hh.dat stores the Favourites and Search history for each CHM file. It also caches window type information for each CHM. It is usually located in the users profile directory under "Application Data\Microsoft\HTML Help" and also has the ITSF format.
hhcolreg.dat stores information about collections on a system. It is an XML file and is usually located in the system help dir or in the "All Users" profile directory under "Application Data\Microsoft\HTML Help"